#foreverconey

This weekend consider an escape to Forever Coney: Photographs from the Brooklyn Museum Collection! It is your final opportunity to experience this unique exhibition, featuring rarely-seen photographs that trace the rich history of the Brooklyn beach town, from the post-Civil War period through the turn of the twentieth century.

This image, by one of my favorite Coney artists, Stephen Salmieri, captures a woman in the ocean, surrounded by waves and onlooking swimmers in the distance. By filling the lower photographic field with the sole texture of water, the artist positions the viewer directly within the intimate scene of peaceful recreation, reminding us of Coney’s central role as a getaway from urban dwellers in need of space and calm on a hot summer’s day. We hope to see you at the Museum this weekend, and on the beach soon!

At the start of the twentieth century, visitors to Coney Island were multiplying rapidly. This photograph by Irving Underhill was taken in 1913 when the population of New York City was around 5 million and Brooklyn’s more than 1.6 million. With up to half a million tourists during the summers of the 1910s, Coney Island attractions were the weekend getaway for a significant number of New Yorkers. Seven years later, the expansion of the BMT train service connected Coney Island to Manhattan. Costing only a nickel, the number of daily visitors doubled to over a million a day.

In Underhill’s photograph, the swimmers and beach crowd at front seamlessly extend from the strollers and sightseers of the boardwalk and amusement parks. Men in shoes and ubiquitous straw boater hats and women in a variety of styles intermingle with the conservative woolen suits of the swimmers. The sand is so packed that there is little room for lounging or sleeping, although a few bold tourists attempt to make space between the footsteps. In the water, bathers hug the shallow shore line.

In the year 1930, the extraordinary and elusive circus photographer, Edward J. Kelty, documented the Harlem Black Birds, an African American musical revue assembled for a performance at Coney Island. Known for his year-book style group portraits, here Kelty captures African American singers, dancers and musicians—many of whom are women sporting checkered hats and dresses—nestled among bosses, prop men, and other behind-the scenes workers and relatives.

The debonair man wearing a derby and bow tie, with a cigar in his hand at center of the small group on the bleachers is likely the legendary tap dancer King Rastus Brown. This racially stereotypical title was presumably a stage name. Even more problematic are the two blackface comics, whose makeup and gloves render them in this black and white photograph as racially ambiguous, standing atop right and left booths. These disconcerting details, in addition to the caricatured faces on the banner above the group, remind us that although Coney Island was a place of diversity, it was hardly free of racism. However, performing with the Black Birds gave these entertainers a rare chance to belong to an esteemed group as they introduced audiences in New York and Paris to African American music.

This Brooklyn-born artist began his series on Coney Island in 1966, shortly after graduating from the School of Visual Arts. Stephen Salmieri considered this body of work to be his first self-assigned project as a young artist, deriving inspiration from Coney Island’s diversity and decay over the course of six years. In this image, Salmieri focuses on a balloon-toss worker whose teased hairstyle and downturned head resembles the inflated forms in the background. The artist’s use of a lightweight camera, a post-war innovation, is evidenced by the daring sense of engagement in this carefully composed photograph. By isolating the subject and cropping out the surrounding amusement park activity, Salmieri establishes a distinct sense of intimacy, as though the viewer could be next in line to play the game.

When it opened in May 1904, Dreamland Park was among the most costly amusement parks in the United States. A small group of powerful New York politicians raised $3.5 million and made some under-the-table deals in order to have Dreamland up and running at Coney Island exactly one year after Luna Park opened. These men, led by the former state senator William H. Reynolds, sought to capitalize on the immediate financial success of Luna Park. In order to outdo Luna, located directly across Surf Avenue, they made everything bigger and brighter at Dreamland. The 375-foot-high Beacon Tower was much taller than Luna’s Kaleidoscope Tower and the one million electric lights quadrupled those at Luna. In addition, as seen in this photograph by Eugene Wemlinger, a thirty-five-foot-high statue of a voluptuous nude angel, framed by a golden arch and crowned with an electric sign, towered over visitors.

This statue served multiple purposes. It was a startling contrast to the red-and-white pinwheels across the street at Luna and it positioned the park as a virtuous counterpoint to the zany Steeplechase, with its devilish Funny Face. The statue’s immense presence immediately signaled that Dreamland was different from these earlier parks. Many of the buildings at Dreamland housed biblically or morally inspired attractions, including Hell Gate and The End of the World. However, the use of an angel to frame the entrance to Dreamland was also cleverly subversive in that the religious connotations allowed for excessive female nudity to be on display.  

The photographer Nathan Lerner closely cropped this image of the iconic Parachute Jump at Coney Island so that an unfurled parachute, seen from below, appears unfamiliar. Lerner was interested in the manipulation and structural characteristics of light, which can be seen in the way he captured sunlight filtering through the billowing, translucent fabric.

Visitors to Coney Island took pleasure in the exotic and unusual, which included animals and people native to other countries. Elephants, both real and constructed, were a pervasive part of the resort’s amusements. The fascination with elephants began as early as 1884, with the opening of the 122-foot-high Elephant Hotel. Nineteen years later, Thomas Edison’s film crew recorded the tragic death by electrocution of Topsy the Elephant on the site of what would become Luna Park.

Steeplechase Park offered elephant rides in 1897, the year it opened, perhaps capitalizing on the loss of the Elephant Hotel by fire the previous year. When the park itself burned to the ground in 1907, owner George C. Tilyou rebuilt Steeplechase, constructing a two-acre glass-and-steel building that allowed visitors to enjoy many amusements during bad weather.

In this photograph, Eugene Wemlinger captured the interior of the new Pavilion of Fun, complete with a massive decorative elephant that blew jets of air at unsuspecting passersby. The crowd gathered in front of the elephant suggests its popularity with visitors.

Lynn Hyman Butler’s “Coney Island Kaleidoscope” series combats the idea of Coney Island as a time-capsule of nostalgia. During a period of escalating crime, political corruption, and financial instability, artists such as Butler considered the site’s uncertain fate as a subject and source of inspiration for their work. Saturated colors glide through these playful photographs, taken while Butler was physically in motion, emulating the vision of a visitor in flux on an amusement park ride while gesturing at the unstoppably rapid speed at which Coney Island transforms.

Here, three figures stride forward boldly in contemporary attire. Their leather vests, tight jeans, and tattooed arms pulse through the streaky rendering of the beach boardwalk. The assertive dynamism of the subjects in combination with the vibrant sense of movement and chaos reject sentimentality, instead alluding to the velocity of time. Butler is interested in conveying the rush of disorder and change from past to present Coney Island, and aims to signal the need for preservation in its future.